The Magic Mountain (10 page)

His brain, which worked calmly and slowly—particularly since Hans Castorp retained the habit of drinking porter with his morning snack—gradually filled up with analytical geometry, differential equations, mechanics, projective geometry, and graphical statics. He calculated displacements—with full cargo and empty—stabilities, shifts in trim, and metacenters, though it was drudgery at times. His technical drawings, all the sketches of ribbing, waterlines, and full-length projections, were not quite as good as his watercolor depiction of the
Hansa
on the high sea, but when the abstract graphics required the sensual addition of a wash for shading or lively colors for various materials in a cross section, Hans Castorp proved more skillful than most.

When he came home on vacations—very neat, very well dressed, sporting a little reddish-blond moustache in the middle of his sleepy, young, patrician face, looking for all the world like a young man on his way to a respectable place in life—the people who concerned themselves with the affairs of the community, who kept themselves well informed about various families and the staffing of municipal offices (and that means most people in a self-governing city-state), his fellow citizens, then, looked him over and asked themselves what public role young Castorp might one day grow into. He had tradition behind him, his was a good, old name, and it was almost inevitable that someday he would have to be reckoned with as a political factor. By then he would be sitting in the assembly or on the committee of burghers, making laws, would hold an honorable post where he would participate in the concerns of government, as an administrator, perhaps as director of the finance or building committees. His voice would be listened to and his vote would count. People were curious about which party young Castorp would one day embrace. Appearances were deceiving, but he looked exactly like someone democrats would
not
be able to count on, and the resemblance to his grandfather was undeniable. Perhaps he would take after him, become a conservative, a brake on other elements. That was quite possible—but so was the opposite. For he was an engineer after all, a shipbuilder in the making, a man of global commerce and technology. So that it might well be that Hans Castorp would join up with the radicals, turn out to be a go-getter, a profane destroyer of old buildings and beautiful landscapes, as footloose as a Jew, as irreverent as an American, a man likely to prefer a ruthless break with venerable traditions to cautious development of natural resources, a man who would plunge the state into reckless experiments—that was conceivable, too. Was it in his blood to regard their Excellencies, the men for whom the sentries at the town hall presented arms, as elders who knew best—or would he be inclined to support the opposition in the assembly? His curious fellow citizens could find no answer to such questions in those blue eyes under their reddish-blond brows; and Hans Castorp, being an unwritten page, would probably have had no answer, either.

When he set out on the journey where we met him, he was twenty-three years old. He had four semesters of study at Danzig Polytechnic behind him, plus four more spent at technical colleges in Braunschweig and Karlsruhe, had recently put his first final exams behind him, passing them with no trouble, though without fanfare or drum roll, and was about to join the firm of Tunder and Wilms as an unsalaried engineer-in-training in order to gain practical experience on the docks. And at that point, his life took the following turn.

His exams had meant a long period of concentrated work, and upon returning home he looked paler than he ought—even given his general type. Dr. Heidekind scolded whenever he saw him and insisted on a change of air, and he meant a radical change. Norderney or Wyk on the island of Föhr, he said, would not do it this time, and if you were to ask him, what Hans Castorp needed was a few weeks in the Alps before going to work on the docks.

That was fine, Consul Tienappel told his nephew and ward, but then their paths would have to part for the summer, because wild horses couldn’t drag him, Consul Tienappel, to the Alps. That was not for him, he required sensible barometric pressure or he would have another attack. Hans Castorp could go right ahead and take a trip to the Alps. Why not pay Joachim Ziemssen a visit?

That was a logical suggestion. Joachim Ziemssen was ill in fact—not ill like Hans Castorp, but really, dangerously ill, had even given them all quite a scare. He had always been susceptible to bronchitis and fevers, and then one day he actually coughed up red, and Joachim was shipped off posthaste to Davos—much to his great regret and dismay, because he was very close to seeing his ambition fulfilled. Bowing to the will of his family, he had first spent a couple of semesters studying law, but then, following an irresistible urge, he had changed horses and volunteered as an ensign, and had been accepted. And for the last five months he had been sitting in the International Sanatorium Berghof (Dr. Behrens, supervising physician), and was bored half to death, as he wrote in a postcard. And so if Hans Castorp was to treat himself to a little vacation before taking up his job with Tunder and Wilms, nothing could be more sensible than to provide his poor cousin with company up there in the mountains—it was the most pleasant solution for both parties.

It was the height of summer when he decided to take the trip—already the last week of July.

He planned to stay three weeks.

Hans Castorp had been afraid he would oversleep, he had been so thoroughly exhausted, but he was up and about earlier than necessary and had plenty of time leisurely to pursue his usual, highly civilized morning routine—its chief utensils included a rubber basin, a wooden bowl of green, lavender-scented soap, and a straw-colored brush—and was able not only to tend to matters of personal hygiene but also to unpack and put his things away. And as he passed the silver-plated blade across the perfumed foam on his cheeks, he recalled his muddled dreams and smiled an indulgent smile at such nonsense, shaking his head with the superiority of a man shaving by the light of reasonable day. He did not feel all that well rested, but fresh enough to meet the morning.

He powdered his cheeks and slipped into his plaid undershorts and red morocco-leather slippers, and still drying his hands, he stepped out onto the balcony, which, although private, was connected to those adjoining and separated from them only by an opaque glass partition that extended almost to the railing. The morning was cool and cloudy. Long banks of fog lay motionless along the hills to both sides, while masses of clouds, white and gray, were draped on the more distant mountains. Patches and streaks of blue sky were visible here and there, and when a ray of sun broke through, the village in the valley below glistened white against the dark forests of pine on the slopes. Somewhere morning music was playing; presumably it came from the same hotel where the concert had been held the evening before. Muted chords of a chorale drifted toward him; a march followed after a brief pause. Hans Castorp loved music with all his heart, its effect being much like that of the porter he drank with his morning snack—profoundly calming, numbing, and “doze”-inducing—and he listened now with pleasure, his head tilted to one side, mouth open, eyes slightly bloodshot.

He looked down at the winding road they had followed up to the sanatorium the evening before. Short-stemmed, starlike gentians were blooming in the moist grass of the slope. A section of the level ground had been fenced in to form a garden with gravel paths, flowerbeds, and an artificial grotto beneath a stately silver fir. Next to a metal-roofed arcade, open to the south and filled with lounge chairs, stood a flagpole, painted reddish brown and displaying a banner that fluttered full now and then—a fantasy flag, green and white, with a snake-entwined caduceus, the symbol of healing, at its center.

A woman was walking in the garden, an older lady with a gloomy, even tragic look. Clad completely in black, with a black veil wound round her disheveled grayish-black hair, she wandered restlessly along the paths, keeping an even but quick pace, her knees slightly bent, her arms hanging stiffly at an angle in front of her. Her brow was creased by a frown, and her lowered, coal-black eyes, the skin beneath them forming drooping bags, were directed straight ahead. Her aging face, with its pale Mediterranean complexion and large, careworn mouth turned down at one corner, reminded Hans Castorp of a picture he had once seen of a famous tragedian; and it was eerie to watch how this pale woman dressed in black matched her long, somber strides, apparently without realizing it, to the rhythm of march music in the distance.

Hans Castorp gazed down at her in thoughtful sympathy, and it seemed as if her sad appearance darkened the morning sun. Simultaneously, however, he perceived something else, something audible, coming from the adjoining room on his left, the room with the Russian couple, so Joachim had said—noises that were likewise ill suited to this cheerful, fresh morning, that tainted it, making it seem sultry somehow. Hans Castorp remembered that he had heard the same sounds the night before, but had been too tired to pay them any attention. Giggles, gasps, grapplings—there was no disguising the indelicate nature of the sound, although in his kindheartedness the young man at first tried hard to give it a harmless interpretation. One could use other terms for his kindheartedness—an insipid phrase like “purity of soul,” for instance, or a more serious and beautiful word like “modesty,” or disparaging words such as “avoidance of the truth” and “hypocrisy,” or even a phrase about “the mystic piety of shyness”—and Hans Castorp’s reaction to the sounds from the adjoining room combined something of them all and was visible now as a shadow of respectability that darkened his face, as if he should not know and did not want to know anything about what he heard there. It was an expression of propriety—not exactly original, but one he was in the habit of assuming under certain circumstances.

And with this look on his face he returned to his room to avoid having to listen any longer to the proceedings, which despite the giggles sounded terribly serious, disconcertingly so. But the events on the far side of the wall were even more audible from his room. An apparent chase around the furniture, the crash of an upturned chair, a grab, an embrace, slaps and kisses—and then, of all things to accompany the invisible scene, a waltz was struck up in the distance, the tired melody of a popular ballad. Hans Castorp stood, towel in hand, and listened against his best intentions. And suddenly a blush rose up under his talcum, because what he had clearly seen coming had now arrived, and beyond any doubt, the game had turned bestial. “Good God in heaven!” he thought, turning away to finish dressing with as much noise as he could manage. “Well, they’re married, for heaven’s sake, that’s as it should be at least. But in broad daylight, that is a bit much. And I’m almost certain that they disturbed the peace last night, too. After all, they are ill, that’s why they’re here, or one of them is at least, and a little self-control wouldn’t be out of place. But of course,” he realized angrily, “the real scandal is that the walls are so thin and that you can hear everything so clearly, and that’s simply intolerable! Cheap construction, naturally, shamefully cheap! I wonder if I shall see these people later, or even be introduced to them? That would be most embarrassing.” But now Hans Castorp realized to his amazement that the flush that had come to his freshly shaven cheeks had not subsided, or at least the warmth that had come with it was not about to depart—the same hot, dry face that had bothered him yesterday evening, and that had disappeared while he slept, was back now in full force. This did not make him feel any friendlier toward the married couple next door, indeed he pouted his lips and muttered something very disparaging about them; and now he made the mistake of splashing his face with water again to cool it, which only made matters worse. And so he was feeling cross and at loose ends when he heard his cousin knock on the wall and call out to him. His expression, as Joachim entered the room, was not that of a man refreshed by sleep and ready to greet the morning.

“Hello,” Joachim said. “So that was your first night up here. Are you well satisfied?”

He was ready for a walk, dressed in sporty clothes and sturdy, tooled boots, his ulster flung over his arm, the outline of the flat bottle clearly visible in one pocket. He wasn’t wearing a hat today, either.

“Thanks,” Hans Castorp replied, “well enough. I’ll not categorize it any further. I had some rather confused dreams. And the place has one shortcoming, you know, it’s not soundproof—that is rather annoying. Who was the woman in black out in the garden?”

Joachim knew at once whom he meant.

“Ah, that’s
Tous-les-deux
,” he said. “That’s what we all call her at least, because those are the only words you ever hear out of her. She’s Mexican, you see, and knows not a word of German and almost no French, either, just a few scraps. She’s been here with her eldest son for five weeks now, a perfectly hopeless case, who’ll be making his exit soon enough—it’s all through him, his whole body’s poisoned with it, you could say, and at that stage it looks a lot like typhoid fever, Behrens says—gruesome for all involved, at any rate. And two weeks ago, now, her second son arrived up here, because he wanted to see his brother one last time—handsome young fellow, by the way, but then so is the other—both of them pretty as pictures, with those glowing eyes that drive the ladies crazy. Well, the younger one already had a little bit of a cough down below, but was otherwise in quite good shape. And no sooner does he arrive than he has a temperature—and I mean a high fever, a hundred and three right away—he takes to his bed, and if he ever gets up again, Behrens says, he’ll have more luck than sense. But in any case, it was high time, and then some, for him to come up here. Yes, and since then the mother just wanders about, when she’s not sitting with them, and the only thing she ever says to anyone she meets is: ‘
tous les deux!
’ Because that’s all she knows how to say, and there’s no one here who understands Spanish.”